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Electric vehicle demand could cause UK 'power crunch'

By Andrew English • 13/11/2015

Electric cars might seem like the answer to pollution problems, but they'll place huge pressure on the National Grid at a time when it's already struggling to cope

Respectable, Mel and Kim's 1987 dance-floor filler sat uncomfortably with the brutalist Sixties Barbican Estate backdrop to the Energy Live conference. Or maybe it didn't. The conference's opening chords of jangly, forgettable Thatcher-pop, juxtaposed with Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's 35-acre utopian dream of high-density, inner-city living seemed like a good metaphor for the energy industry at present. The government's U-turn on renewable subsidies has thrown it into disarray.

"We know what they don't want," said one speaker, "what we don't know is what they dowant."

With an audience of energy company senior management, specialists and politicians, I'd come with a single question, which was whether the wheezing, maligned, over (and under) regulated, and in many cases unprofitable energy industry has the plans and the wherewithal to recharge a new generation of electric vehicles?

The demand side of this question is obvious. To get anything larger than a Ford Mondeothrough the EU's next carbon dioxide (CO2) fleet average target of 95g/km by 2020 is going to require car makers to adopt plug-in hybrid technology, plus there's a new generation of pure battery-electric cars hungry for energy.

There are push and pull factors here. Renault/Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn once claimed that 20 per cent of his company's sales would be of electric vehicles by 2020 (he's since recanted), but in spite of such bullish claims, sales of electric cars have been slow and the promised gains in range and reductions in price have been less than hoped. This means recharging demands have been slow to ramp up.

On the pull side, however, is the continuing ramifications of the VW emissions cheating scandal, which as well as auguring new testing regimes, might also require another look at the 95g/km target. The EU has already promised more robust testing and on-road nitrogen oxide (NOx) tests by 2017, but car industry investors are also calling for on-road CO2 testing. Tougher tests are going to make meeting eco targets harder for car makers, which could mean even small cars need electrification.

Last week the supply side showed itself to be somewhat less than robust, when seven ageing coal-fired power stations broke down, causing a supply crisis where electricity prices rose from £60 to £2,500 per megawatt hour and the National Grid had to pay businesses to reduce consumption. This "power crunch" saw up to 10 per cent of the UK's power supplied by sources which will be closed by next year – to meet EU air-quality rules; 13 power stations (mainly coal fired) are set to close or reduce capacity before March.

"These carbon targets have been heaped on the electricity generation industry with a [mistaken] perception about what the solutions were and a confusion of energy and climate-change objectives," said Angela Knight, former boss of Energy UK, the trade body for energy suppliers, at an Energy Live fringe meeting. She called for a stop on all generating plant closures until their replacements are actually generating electricity. "It should be lights on, first. Bills down, second. And carbon reduction, third," she said.

Her words were echoed by energy minister Andrea Leadsom, who talked of an energy "trilemma", where the problems of achieving sufficient and secure supplies of energy should go hand in hand with CO2 reduction. "Keeping the lights on should be at the core of any government action," she said.

But most of the talk was about maintaining existing supply, not the tidal wave of electric vehicle recharging demand just over the horizon. A UK Power networks presentation saw the startling prediction that in five years time the company will be delivering just as many electrical charging posts for cars as it will deliver lamp posts. A measure of this coming demand was shown at the Venice Sustainability Conference last month, when Professor Yasuhiro Daisho of Waseda university in Japan pointed out that "if you have 20,000 electric vehicles plugged into 50kW fast chargers, that's the output of an entire nuclear power station."

It's also almost twice the installed capacity of the London Array, Europe's biggest wind farm, so where's the spare capacity going to come from to charge these vehicles?

Seems the industry has problems even meeting existing demand. Knight tried to put the lack of safety generating capacity into perspective. "They say it's five per cent, but what does that mean?" she asked. "I reckon that's roughly one and a half power stations [experts in the audience nodded] and if it's early November and we're running out of power now, we've got a problem."

'Keeping the lights on should be at the core of government action'

Former coalition energy minister Ed Davey called the Government's energy policies, "stupid and barmy". We caught up with Davey later and asked whether the coalition had anticipated the potential demand for recharging electricity from the transport sector. "It was a massive issue," he said, "but in the last few years we've been dealing in declining [electricity] demand. That's good, but we knew there was a potential demand increase in the long term.

"The trouble is, while we are pretty certain that electric cars will be the future, no one is absolutely certain, so you have to plan for a lot of different possibilities. Sadly, even politicians can't see into the future – I am not God."

They were turning on the lights in the Barbican as I left the conference, slightly stupefied. When you consider the clever ideas the motor industry has come up with in recent years, including using electric cars and their spent batteries as peak demand-smoothing buffers, connecting houses, towns and transport links such as that being trialled by Toyota in its Home Energy Management homes in Nagoya, Japan, or some of the really interesting ideas for a hydrogen economy, the lack of foresight I saw here was amazing. It seemed as if the future is so occluded no one wants to make any decisions at all.

"There's a lack of transparency," said Lawrence Slade, chief executive of Energy UK . "It's clear up to 2020, but after that there's tremendous uncertainty."

"They are getting better at managing the grid, added Dr Peter Pilgrim, a battery and charging specialist with Audi, when I put my concerns to him. "But we are all on the same time frame and sometimes the wind blows when we don't need electricity and we have to turn the turbines off. Unless they've built interconnectors with Asia, we'll still need buffer storage systems. We are at the beginning of this technology and no one knows the future."

Yet most of the power generation facilities we have in the UK were built by the same people who built the Barbican. They couldn't have seen the future, either, but they had vision, optimism and drive, and as I walked through the elegant high rises of this London estate, I couldn't help thinking our mean and blinkered perspectives are impoverishing not just us, but also threatening the future of electrified transportation.

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